1 Boring Old Man

Well, I finally saw "Boogie Man," the PBS Frontline documentary about Lee Atwater – the political strategist who ran George H.W. Bush‘s campaign in 1988 – literally destroying Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis in the process. His protege` cohort in that campaign included Karl Rove and George W. Bush. Atwater actually came into national politics by reviving Ronald Reagan’s Campaign in 1980 in South Carolina, but didn’t get the front seat until Bush’s campaign.

It’s painful to talk about the program. All of this happened in the midst of the busiest days of my career, and I knew nothing of the story at the time. Although he was a likeable southerner who played blues guitar and had a quick wit, he looms as one of the most destructive figures in American politics. The line of Donald Segretti [Nixon], Lee Atwater [Reagan/Bush I], Karl Rove [Nixon/Reagan/Bush I, Bush II], Mary Matalin [all of them], and Steve Schmidt [McCain] will live in infamy, but Lee Atwater was the high priest. Let’s hope George W. Bush was the final product.

By now, Atwater’s techniques are well known to us – leaks, innuendo, Talking Points, push polling. They were so blatant back then, but the derivitives are fresh in our minds from the softened versions used by McCain – Reverend Wright, William Ayers, Hussein, etc. Back in Atwater’s heyday, he leaked frank lies, like Rove’s trick for George Bush used on McCain in South Carolina – an illegitimate black baby. Watching dirty trick after dirty trick, it’s hard to imagine that it really happened, that our national politics could’ve sunk to that level. By age 40, he was chairman of the Republican National Committee and he developed an aggressive brain tumor. While undergoing a desparate but hopeless set of treatments, he became physically almost unrecognizable, and had a conversion – apologizing for the things he’d done.

In the documentary, people like Mary Matalin and Karl Rove talked about him as being a brilliant strategist – someone who really understood the political process. That’s an unreasoned and indefensible characterization of a professional con-man by other professional con-persons. Lee Atwater came from South Carolina and learned his trade from the consumate southern huckster – Strom Thurman: from an interview with Stefan Forbes, the film’s director:

^{Atwater’s tactics were successful for so long — and so little-understood by most Democrats — that it was inevitable they’d come to dominate the modern GOP. His biggest insight was that people don’t vote on 10-point plans but on their emotions. Atwater used a Southern technique called "slow-playing," using his Southern drawl and aw-shucks country demeanor so opponents would underestimate him.}

^{Using his graduate degree in communications, he expertly used the media as an echo chamber for "sticky" messages. His constant references to an irrelevant African American criminal pushed a lot of other issues out of the public consciousness. The success of the Willie Horton ad led in a straight line to the Swift Boat ads, and some of the anti-Obama attack ads. Most Democrats forgot the lessons of the Clinton years: respond immediately, don’t look weak and communicate clearly and simply. In ’88 Lee opened the floodgates for the constant drumbeat of negative politics we see today.}

^{Dirty tricks and racial-fear appeals were definitely part of Atwater’s arsenal, but they may have helped distract Democrats from his most powerful battleground: the culture war. Strom Thurmond taught him how to marginalize Democrats as elitists who didn’t love the flag or care about the Bible or the working man. Lee marginalized Mike Dukakis, who had lived the American dream, by constantly mocking him to the press with cracks about "frostbelt liberals" and "quiche in a can." Democratic party leaders had long marginalized Southern voices like [Sen.] Fritz Hollings [S.C.], who could have taught them how to counter these classic Southern stump-speech techniques. They paid the costs of that institutional elitism.}

^{Atwater also understood the devastating power of mockery in American politics. Remember, the prevailing narrative early in ’88 was of George H.W. Bush as a career loser, a nasal-sounding wimp who couldn’t even handle the syntax thing. Atwater got the press off Bush’s back and onto Dukakis’. Atwater helped create the "Tank Ride" ad, which made Dukakis a figure of everlasting ridicule. In Boogie Man, we show how the shots of Dukakis in a tank helmet blinded everyone to the ad’s blatant distortions of Dukakis’ record.}

^{Atwater helped tabloid-ize the Washington political media, encouraging them to act like a bunch of mean grade-school kids teasing someone in the playground. This may have helped defeat Gore in 2000, when the media spent much of the campaign mocking him for things he hadn’t really ever said, and Kerry in 2004, when windsurfing was generally taken as evidence of being unfit to govern.}

Saying No to Lee Atwater
Time Magazine
March 20, 1989

^{Just weeks after George Bush was elected President, his campaign manager and newly named Republican Chairman Lee Atwater launched an effort to lure black voters into the G.O.P. Calling for an end to blacks’ "blind allegiance" to the Democrats, Atwater talked about providing minorities with leadership positions in the Republican National Committee. He even promoted his love of black music, strumming a guitar and warbling at Washington rhythm-and-blues clubs. At the same time, Atwater — who cut his political teeth as a protege of South Carolina’s once segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond — downplayed his role in devising the crypto-racist Willie Horton ads that helped Bush win the White House. "That’s in the past," he insisted.}

^{Last week students at Howard University in Washington, perhaps the nation’s most distinguished black college, let Atwater know that the past had not been forgotten. Outraged by his appointment in January to the Howard board of trustees, more than 200 students seized the school’s main administration building in the most intense burst of campus unrest since the Viet Nam War. Hundreds of other students demonstrated outside, chanting slogans and demanding Atwater’s resignation from the board. Four days after the rebellion began, with riot police threatening to storm the building, Atwater stepped down…}

^{… the students had sent a clear message to Atwater and the G.O.P.: It will take more than just strumming the blues to realize their dream of a Republican "rainbow coalition."}

^{George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater}